Well, there is a lot of talk and argumentation in many metaphysical circles about what it means when a manuscript describes some shimmering being or being that sounds a lot like a definition of a God or Gods. This is largely because the existing paradigms poo-poo that sort of thinking. It implies there are forces outside of our own human based control that may or may not hold us accountable, and most people don’t care for that conception since the predominate view is one that is most often Christian.
However, just because we have all had experiences with belief systems that have rubbed us the wrong way, it does not therefore mean that those belief systems do not have certain truths basically right. The temptation is usually to reject the entirety of the matter on the basis of some beliefs that felt as though they harmed us in some way. In many instances, those beliefs may well have done us particular harm, but more harm can be done if we do not revisit the essential truths that underlie religions such as Christianity.
My belief is that in most instances when the ancient manuscripts say they saw a shimmering God or Goddess, they likely weren’t lying. They were seeing some variety of intelligence that is now out of the norm for people to see. Why is it out of the norm for people to see? Because to see it means having to adjust our beliefs around. It is often easier to simply turn our heads and pretend nothing exists.
These God and Goddess forms, it is my contention, are vast amalgamations of light. We, on the other hand, are very small pin pricks of light. All of this light has to come from somewhere, and the place I can point to for that is only “up”–where the stars are. This is because that is where heavenly kinds of light exist, including actual stars–which as the Cherokee rightly claimed in my view, is where they were from. They were even specific about the constellation–chiefly the Pleiades. Alignments among buildings and pyramids in the Egyptian world can be found to this constellation as well. It hails from Taurus the bull. Isis was a Goddess often associated with this constellation.
Linkages can be found elsewhere in older temple complexes and the like. Odds are, these complexes were made to “augment” the astral energy–in other worlds to “pull a little bit of heaven down to Earth” so that the “children of the stars” could have a little heaven on Earth.
Astrology works in part because these sparks are little parts of the all. Each one contains a small copy of the entire universe form whence it came. Because of this, the condition of the universe when they are “come into” the world will tell you a little something about them if you know where and how to look.
Hence, astrology works because it IS where everyone comes from initially, and it IS them. We are children of the stars, so the stars don’t govern us exactly–they are us.]]>
The Catholic Church Biblically gains its authority from Peter. Peter, it is said, was the “rock” on which the church was built. If we think of this from a Kabbalah perspective, we will deduce that “rock” is going to be in the lower spheres of the tree. We could make a good case that this rock was the sphere of Netzach, but for all practical purposes we will consider it to be equivalent to Malkuth. Why Malkuth? Because it is the foundation of the chart and so the church is the “foundation” or physical manifestation of spirituality.
Gnostic traditions concern themselves with knowledge—that’s what the word means. Knowledge exists between two spheres on the tree, and both of those are upper spheres. One sphere is Chokmah, or wisdom, whereas the other sphere is Binah or understanding. Daat is knowledge, which technically doesn’t exist—as it is an intermediate state between wisdom and understanding.
Wisdom traditions are easy enough to identify. Buddhism and most eastern zen traditions are all about wisdom—non labeling and so forth. Catharism and Manichaeism come from the sphere of understanding. How so? Mainly because they posit duality—a good God and Evil God to be specific. To them, the God of evil was the one of the world. The whole point of Catharism and Manichaeism was to transcend this “evil God” and find liberation in the upper branches of the tree.
It is important to state that all of the spheres are equally important and their perspectives are both true. However, the views each of these movements represented sphere wise began to overlap domains in ways neither of them should have. It may be that duality can posit the lower sphere as “evil” but that’s not necessarily helpful. Likewise, it is not the Catholic Church’s realm to posit what is or is not knowledge since it is their function to be foundation.
When you pit two spheres against one another, and you live on planet Earth, which sphere do you suppose is going to prevail in terms of what remains in the physical realm? Well, the sphere of foundation is going to persevere there because it is the most “Earthy”. That means it is also the most likely to implement methods that we might consider to be more “earthly” which is to say less idealistic and more order based. If the harmony of the tree starts to shake and shatter, this will be the result.
Likewise, knowledge will be lost in such a situation because the foundation will systematically eliminate it if it feels like it threatens foundation. Again, rigid foundation is not the job of the foundation. A better way to have addressed this from the point of view of foundation would have been to figure out ways to integrate this new information such that it was disseminated in a way that makes sense with previous stories.
The spiritual faucet is not such that it is turned on then switched off with no change. There are constant attainments and knowledge that require adaptation. We are not on a spiritual line, but a spiral, and that spiral creates different situations and different perspectives as we flow with it. Instead, foundation stepped in and tried to crush the sphere of knowledge. This has led to worldwide spiritual ignorance on mass scales and has arrested the spiral in ways not intended.
The good news is, however, that the tree is always reconstituted. You cannot technically crush a sphere, it will simply wait a while and reconstitute. This is because the pattern of the tree will always repeat because it IS the image that IS. When it is unbalanced, it seeks to re-achieve that balance. The scales at which this happen are unimaginably large in some cases, and immediate in others. If spiritual evolution is not moving “up” then it tends to vibrate in a heavier way. This heaviness continues until an earnest effort is made to raise the vibration of the whole thing. One can have a foundation composed of death, violence, and heavy-handed privilege, but the tree constituted in such a scenario is going to be twisted and gnarled because the roots are. The same thing is true of individual people, who comprise the world tree. If the foundations are twisted and skewed, so too will the character of the person be.
It is my estimation that humanity, at this point, is mostly choosing to stay in lower vibratory realities. This is because we tend to admire traits in people that are not all that laudable. We look back at history and use the bad that occurs as an excuse to justify what we think it means to be “human”. The natural conclusion is that we experience denser, heavier, more miserable states because of it on average—and when the spheres war, everyone loses.]]>
First, some astro-related academic matters. I am going to analyze this chart from the tropical style assuming Central Standard Time and a Placidus House System. If you look elsewhere you will find other charts that are shifted in different ways slightly. Don’t worry about this. In every astrological system I have ever used, I always find myself with the same story in the end regardless of the system. The specifics don’t matter terribly–there is an elasticity to the systems that wind up saying roughly the same things—just from different angles. This is even true if your time is off by an hour. This is because there is no time, and no limit on heaven. However, the basic relations stay the same. With those caveats out of the way, I’ll present the chart:
Looking at it, we can see a few things right off the bat. In the second house, we see a little green guy called chiron. He shows where we are wounded. Williams had a wound in his values that we would describe as spiritual since the wound rests in Sagittarius. We see a red line off of it to Saturn in the 11th house in Virgo suggesting that being of service in groups of people aggravates this wound. However, purging the person will in terms of ideas on God in the 9th house works very nicely with this wound. That tells us this wound is meant to be stripped through philosophy in a Leo way–the native is meant to be inspirational but only through a systematic building up and stripping away of their personal ideas on God.
In the third house, we see Capricorn alerting us to the fact there is communication karma here. The mind is being held responsible for the words it picks. We will see why this is so later, but for now, it is sufficient to note. The Fourth house we find the moon and the north node in Pisces. The north node is all about our life path in life, and we could almost consider this to be in the fifth house. However, with Pisces here, the native is learning to find emotional roots that tie into compassion and spirituality. We see some ugly oppositions or red lines off the house to the tenth. Again, this suggests the career robs the native of the chance to have secure emotional roots if not handled carefully. The more successful the native is in the world the greater the tendency for the native not to develop these tender spiritual roots.
Moving on to the fifth house, we find Pisces here as well as Jupiter. The native is supposed to be developing the personal will in a spiritually compassionate way. The will itself however will furiously resist this process as the square shows to Mars.
The eighth house contains gemini. The eighth house is usually considered the house of death and transformation. We find gemini here because the mind is that which is under transformation, particularly communication. We also find the part of fortune here along with a black moon both in Gemini if we turn our esoteric points on. The part of fortune is to make sure the mind is structured right with regard to death. The black moon is the mind ruminating toward death in ways it shouldn’t. We find Uranus and Mars here as well, which are markers that can spell rapid death if not handled well. Both of them are in Cancer. Many “tragic death” charts have these markers, because the native must transform one way or another.
We see both a blessing and a curse leveled at the will of the chart in Mars. The blue lines spell a good use of the will amongst other planets, the red ones bad use or obstacles. There was a very real choice here. Either a) the native could focus on spirit, the emotions and the will and blend them, or–they can focus on the beliefs in their will specifically and judge spirit and experience the will bring about a death-like scenario.
In the ninth house, we find all the beliefs of the native in the higher mind. We find the sun here in cancer, along with Pluto and Mercury in Leo. This foretells that the native is going to have some major issues with God, or the higher mind, and they are in fact being stripped down in their beliefs until they “get it right or die”. Pluto has a tendency to bring about death if not dealt with constructively, and with Mercury next door and Gemini on the eighth house cusp, we can see how the mind can easily get ripped up.
In the tenth house, we find Venus, suggesting that the native will be well loved by people–that the native has a certain charm. This charm can come at a cost, however, of not being able to tie into those emotional believes the opposition shows.
We move on to the 11th and find Virgo. There we discover Saturn close to the 10th house cusp, as well as Neptune close to the 12th. Saturn is in Virgo, Neptune is in Libra. Neptune is where one is sacrificed often or is very, very sensitive. Neptune is also the planet of spirit and sometimes considered a ruler of Pisces, the north node. Saturn has to do with work and duty, and here it has to do with being of service to the group–there is a certain responsibility in this in fact. Likewise, Virgo concerns purity of thought.
A few other minor points paint the picture. We find Astraea in Capricorn in the third, indicating a minor point of karma was how Mr. Williams related to God and in particular his beliefs concerning it.
So if we put it all together what do we get? We get a spirit working to find spirit and having great difficulty believing there is such a thing on some level. Why? Because the more the soul rises and becomes successful, the more it cannot feel. It becomes a slave of the masses and it starts to feel sacrificed. There is not enough time in the family with the children. There is no time to be emotional other than using some kind of substance as a crutch to try to feel nurtured for awhile. By drinking spirits, the native hopes to find spirit if they allow addiction to enter in. It allows the native to ALMOST believe for just a little while. More success, more fame, means more issues with finding that compassion and spirituality so desperately sought. The mind becomes unbalanced, and where will death happen? In the mind, where Mercury rules, or at the throat where it resides, on a Monday, the day of the week ruled by the Moon the natural ruler of Cancer, Mr. Williams sun sign. Since he was getting older, he was arriving at a point where he had little recourse but to start facing those emotional beliefs–work would start to be too much of a burden, along with the demands of the public. The pressure of success built which probably contributed to more hopelessness and an inability to answer those pressing spiritual questions. Thinking that perhaps something had gone wrong, losing faith, Williams eventually decided he wanted to be anywhere but here and so he took his life.
However, that is just the ending of his life. Before that point, he fulfilled much of the rest of his chart. He played roles that were military based and doctor based. He did have a family, and he had children. He made people laugh, and he inspired them. We have a tendency when someone kills themselves to remember only the traumatic ending. Williams was a compassionate soul on many levels, he just didn’t believe in the universal compassion at the end. He embodied that which he sought on more than a few occasions. He made people laugh as a form of mercy–as a way of relieving everyone’s suffering and lightening the mood. This is his legacy. This is what his life stood for. He just didn’t have the strength to carry himself through–he could not find the ability to laugh and instead fell into suffering by his own choice. In that, he is no different than any of us and his journey should inform our own–high on the mountain peaks or low in the valleys, we must do the spiritual work set before us, and free ourselves from our habitual patterns and transcend our dark moments and karma knowing all the while the universe has our back. We have to maintain faith–an inner knowing that the universe was around long before us, and it knows what its doing and it will all work out.]]>
The first word that rolls off the lips is “science”. Science works fairly hard to discredit the subjective. It looks to groups of people in an effort to be objective. It uses consensus building in an effort to try to attain truth. Of course, what it does not take into consideration is that by taking these stipulations as truth, it moves the objective squarely into the subjective. This slide actually makes it fairly easy to fall into group deceptions. Why? Because one is ignoring goodly sized portions of their own subjective experience of the data. The group says the data should do x, then x is what is being tested and observed for. However, groups of people believing a thing is enough to start to “bend reality” in weird ways in accordance with that belief. In other words, if you want to see the world scientifically and you have enough people who wish to also see it that way, then pretty soon science and the ways it looks at the world are all that remains. It is, whether anyone wishes it otherwise or not, a metaphysical system founded on belief in the tenets of the scientific method. To that extent, it is therefore also a faith.
Why is it a faith? Well, modern scientists traditionally have massive hernias when this subject is broached because it is typically done so by Christians or someone with a religious agenda. (Just magickal agendas here, right boys and girls?) They point out that science is a faith to which scientists typically answer that it is no such thing because they are simply using their senses. This is true, but what the scientist misses in this argument is the WAY they are using their senses. They are not simply using their senses to gather data independent of prior beliefs and convictions which are learned from peers, college, and so on. There is a certain “pressure” to conform to the “scientific” paradigm and if you do not, you can lose your career, your funding, or your career AND your funding. So faith operates in such a situation by assuming that science WILL find an answer or it is the BEST tool, or some other such mantra. Why isn’t it? Because, quite simply, in “reality” the statements that both everything is real and nothing is real are simultaneously true.
What do I mean by that? Well, the objective is no more or less real than the subjective. They are both equally real, and it simply depends on how I wish to examine things. If I REALLY want to rely on my senses, I must do so without any other aid than my eyes in my head. Anything else is merely an EXTENSION of my senses. So, for instance, telescopes, microphones, or any other accessory is not, strictly speaking, my senses. It is my senses plus those devices. Likewise, I cannot use mathematics that is not concretely tied to physical reality. Why? Because I am not using my senses directly. I might be able to abstract out, but then if I begin abstracting at some point it is no longer about my senses, but a system of abstraction with rules that may or may not be tied to the “physical world”. My mathematics could become a world unto itself–something that describes something about the rules in which it rests, but says nothing meaningful about the world or worse is a chimera that sometimes says something meaningful and sometimes says something about the rules and being unsure which is which.
Notice anything when we make this adjustment? The world starts to become completely and utterly more subjective. We can’t use a telescope, so all we can do is look up. What do the stars appear to be doing? Does it appear the sun is moving around the Earth? Does Earth look stationary? Well, from the point of view of Earth, Earth IS stationary, and the sun IS moving around it. It just depends on where you want to put center. Center is a subjective preference.
However, a key realization dawns when we realize the equivalency of all these perspectives. Each of these perspectives is a world contained unto itself, and tells us a story about reality. The first, and perhaps MOST important story is the one we have with no devices–the subjective. Why? Because it is the one we can always count on seeing. It has simply always been there for us to observe, and it tells a story if you know how to examine it. This is the key realization of the ancients. They knew by looking up into the sky, that they could mark time and events. They could figure out and calculate with regularity certain events of the galaxy and universe. They didn’t need a watch, they just needed the night sky. As certain indicators from the perspective of the Earth lined up, they knew that one cycle was ending and another was beginning. Science came along and decided it was smarter than all these thousands and probably hundreds of thousands of years of observations. It decided that such “markers” were meaningless because it was ignorant to their methods. The ancients knew because they were not impressed with themselves so much. They knew because the sky was like a gigantic clock to them–an indicator of universal order and methodology. In our rush to increase our “objective scientific understanding” we have completely stomped on this older, reliable methods. Now we spurn them and think people who discuss them simple. It’s “just superstition” they say. Well, fine. What isn’t? Your truth? Subjectivity? Objectivity? Groups? All sides of the same coin. Can’t have one without the other. The right question is “What did the ancients know by looking at the sky that we don’t?” And the answer is, a whole shitload.]]>
There were moments, though, moments of relief from this burdensome feeling of “not everything is okay”. One of those rushes of relief came when I was outside and I could look up at the stars. It wasn’t that the stars DID anything necessarily, it was just the fact they were there at all. There was some weird sense of elevation and relief, like “up there” was reassuring whereas down here for some reason was not.
There are plenty of stories about the fall of humanity from the Garden of Eden. An operative word in this tale is “fall”. Nobody it seems, ever falls up. It’s always down, with the implication being that down is “not as nice”. For some reason though, it always felt to me like “down here” and “up there” need not be so vastly different. Instead it was more like “down here” had opted to get as far away from UP there as possible, to the point that light pollution threatened to block out the stars.
When children point out where things are not right “down here” though, adults dismiss them. “That just isn’t the way the world is.” Incorrect. That just isn’t the way we have made the world–it isn’t the way we WANT the world to be on some level, or have given up hope that it could be some other way.
Where did things get so screwed up? Well, the celestial repository of information on Earth has always been spirituality. Spirituality was cornered after awhile chiefly by Christianity and not so quietly by Catholicism. The native tribes of every land were systematically hunted down and eradicated in most instances. It became easy to do this because these people were “Godless heathens” where Godless was defined by “not our version of God”.
So, our “celestial tie” was corrupted in a “power grab”. This resulted in huge losses of information from native traditions dismissed as being “pagan”. Churches were built on the sites, and some incorporation in the early era of those traditions was accommodated as Christianity had its roots in beliefs that were similar. If it came down to converting or getting gutted, well, it wasn’t too hard to adjust your solstices around Christian festivities.
So, verdict on the “celestial tie” in society? Seriously fucked.
Maybe though, other people would catch on and start to feel the effects the church was making. Right? No. Not at all. Instead, with all that inconvenient celestial crap out of the way, they could turn their attention toward worldly matters and what’s better–bring the churches on board as a wing of business!
The few places who disagreed with this line of thinking, such as the Cathars, were obliterated by the Vatican. So, fast forward several hundred years, and you can see the predicament clearly. The celestial is being ignored and abused by churches who want to have the corner on money who work hand in hand with businesses to keep people blind, ignorant, and dumb.
In the mean time, we are running around as human beings AS IF THIS WERE ALL COMPLETELY NATURAL! Our idiot spiritual leaders are running around trying to tie our hands while even bigger idiot corporations enslave us for a little insurance and a chance at retirement if we behave well enough.
What’s the alternative? A return to the ways that existed before Christianity lost its damn mind. It isn’t that all of it has to be thrown out–as I said, Christianity has its roots in these practices. However, all this “life in heaven” business is not helping the Earth one iota. It has completely destroyed the feminine side of the Earth, which is an essential part of spirituality, and it must cease. Now.
How does it cease? With learning those old spiritual ways. Where does it start? With me, with you. Where can you learn more? Open your eyes. It’s all that has ever been. Bit by bit, the illusions are falling and the reality is setting in. We are the custodians of the Earth, and the celestial knowledge, and we better damn well start taking care of both, and any church that has a problem with that better step out of the way. After all, they taught everyone else how to go on crusades.]]>
It is mainly irrelevant how one describes these cycles in terms of myth. However, it is not mainly irrelevant in terms of matching what one is doing intent-wise with the physical world. The biggest thing overlooked has to do with the imminent “back swing” of the pendulum. All Magick is the breaking of unity. However, the breaking of that unity was originally guided by the source and it is through its wisdom that such wise breaks can be made. If, for instance, one attempts to achieve their own ends using lunar Magick, they may get want they seek–for awhile. Eventually however, day breaks, and the sun comes out. When this happens, the lunar Magick evaporates and the sun has its say. It will balance any transgressions that are lunar in nature.
This is why the only form of Magick that one ought to practice is one that works WITH the universe and its natural rhythms. Any other type of Magick will surely demand the back swing of the pendulum, and such a back swing is going to bring suffering and pain should the works done be such that they were only ego motivated with no thought of the greater effects on the universe.
This is true elementally as well. Water has no equal in aquatic domains, but place it against an Earth heavy domain and its power is diminished. It may “wear away” the Earth, but the Earth serves as a container for it–or boundary. It may eventually wear it down to where there is nothing but water, but such processes take tens of thousands of years in instances where the Earth element is greater.
So, we can say that unity was BROKEN by the source in order that certain energy currents would have reign at certain times, and certain places. When one begins to become conscious of the rhyme and reason of these natural laws, then one can turn internally and discover their meaning in a metaphysical sense. The natural laws mimic the metaphysical ones, and it is only by turning inwards that one can begin to discover the correlations.
There is no power greater than the universe as a whole. If one takes only pieces of the thing and tries to base a magickal system on it, then one will have pieces of power that work at certain times and not at certain other times. In order to operate at a universal level, one must be certain they have become its student. Then one must continue to persist in this student status as it will never be anything other than this.
By seeing the natural law inwardly, though, the student can gain a vast metaphysical understanding while realizing that which is outside is also within.]]>
That we can make this distinction to start the analysis is an indicator of where our analysis will take us. It is NOT the case everything is fate based any more than it is that it is belief based. Rather, it is a combination of these two elements combined where we find reality. Why is that so? Because we just broke it down into those distinctions with relative ease and can clearly see one is the flip side of the other.
Determinists will point out they don’t need to “believe” anything. They simply set things into motion and can “see” the result. Of course, this overlooks the fact that they are believing what they see at a minimal–perhaps ignoring what they feel. Perhaps they also ignore what they dream. Maybe they also do not pay attention to conversations and symbols arising in their realities pointing to other interpretations. It is not that they do not believe anything–they selectively pay attention to one thing and fool themselves into thinking that they then do not believe anything.
Those who fall more to the side of belief will say that their beliefs determine their reality, and certainly no one can argue that from the perspective of what one chooses to believe about their experiences shaping their reality. On the other hand, we might have a difficult time saying that someone “believes” in gravity. It more simply is–a fundamental rule of the reality in which we exist.
Where then does the truth lie for the confused practitioner? An example may help clarify our thinking. Our computers operate along very physical lines. There are laws and rules that our devices are built upon. We would like to say when we turn on the switch to our computer that it would turn on regardless of whether we thought it would or not. Of course, this overlooks some important details. For one thing, not every computer is built the same. Which computer we happen to buy is likely to reflect where our own energy is situated. Did the company have a day where someone was not paying attention to the components that comprise the LAN card as well? Well, if you happen to be someone who has issues with communication, odds are your reality will bend around to accommodate your purchasing of a less than pristine laptop. What happens when you turn on that computer and discover the card is shot? Is it deterministic? Partly. The other part concerned your own beliefs surrounding communication. Which law takes precedence? The one founded on your own beliefs–it came before you bought the laptop. That’s not to say that one could not make a deterministic argument for the event either. It is a combination of both, and to see both requires a perspective shift.
As our analysis started to point out before we began, we can devise two different, opposite, complementary views of reality, but we find that they are both constituents of what amounts to the same thing. Our beliefs hold sway over everything because they are first–they are those bits of us that we hold even when we don’t know we are holding them. They shape things for us–even our experience of gravity.
Even our expectations about the drugs our bodies take in can change how they work. The placebo effect is well documented. If we believe a sugar pill is crack, well then, we will behave like crack heads with our without the crack. Those who become skeptical often do so trying to grapple with the power of belief and how it is arbitrary. Truth, such a person reasons, must lie in what reality produces. Of course, what reality produces is based also upon belief. It is simply that those beliefs are often hidden and hard to see. They may be deeply karmic hidden even to those who hold them–but they are nonetheless held.
As Crowley put it:
In this book it is spoken… of Spirits and Conjurations; of Gods, Spheres, Planes, and many other things which may or may not exist. It is immaterial whether these exist or not. By doing certain things certain results will follow; students are most earnestly warned against attributing objective reality or philosophic validity to any of them.
The only course the tiny quality assurance director didn’t pipe up on as much was philosophy. When it came to philosophy, he was less of a critic, but there were missing pieces. This stuff mattered, it seemed, but it was a pale imitation of what actually mattered.
Part of the problem, I learned in looking back on the experience, was a dogged determination by those in education to make us all specialists in some way. In order to earn a living, we are expected to narrow our horizons to one specific thing that we know much about. However, such a tactic is actually hostile to the acquisition of knowledge and wisdom. Buckminster Fuller summarizes this perfidious march toward specialization thus:
“So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.”
Our education then begins to reflect this need for superfluous specialization—and my tiny quality assurance inspector would have none of it.
Mathematical theorems, given certain assumptions apply, and given certain other assumptions do not. Eventually dates of happenings are forgotten. Since I have left chemistry class, I have had to consult a periodic chart a sum total of 0 times. It’s not that it wasn’t interesting to learn about these things—it’s that the emphasis on those things as important to education are rather silly. Why are they rather silly? Because once you understand how to THINK you can then understand how to use any tool at your disposal—and you can learn to use it on a scale that is more permanent.
This ability—this propensity for knowing how to THINK is shared by both good philosophers and good occultists. Indeed, often you will see an overlap in that those who are good at the occult are frequently good in art, or psychology. Why is this so? Because the need to be general and adaptable and avoid black and white sort of thinking permeates these fields. It is not that fields that encourage a black and white view of reality are therefore wrong, it is that they are not the final word.
For instance, it was once thought that the universe behaved in a clockwork-like manner with laws that would be discrete and unchanging. When quantum mechanics arose as a discipline, it became apparent that this was not so. It was only APPARENTLY so, and on a small scale was not so at all. Hence, science began to struggle with its own philosophical underpinnings.
The good thing about studying fields such as philosophy is that from the ONSET you know that the answers you get are only tentative. They do not parade themselves as being undying truths about how the universe is. However, the student of philosophy quickly learns that there are certain discussions and viewpoints that ripple through every discourse and when we believe we are discussing science or the economy what it really boils down to is discussing our philosophical beliefs IN LIGHT of these fields.
If someone is intrepid enough, they begin to ask themselves how philosophies form in the first place, and they begin to realize certain truths about archetypes and perspectives. There are many angles one can assume to viewing a given thing. Viewed from one angle, a beautiful vase seems one way, from another another way. If we try to describe the event in words, we often fall short. We simply experience it, and then we attempt to articulate this experience in the form of numbers or words. However, if we go to the archetype of the THING ITSELF or perception itself, we start to get into some strange territory. If we can only change our minds, perhaps so too will the vase change. If we are GOOD ENOUGH at changing our minds about the vase, we might even be able to get other people to see it as we do. The ability to affect reality as this is the beginning of all magick.
The problem now that we face is one where we dismiss “magickal thinking” and replace it with what amounts to “autistic thinking”. If we simply have enough numbers to crunch, no social life, and are willing to specialize our asses in some domain for years, then the economic machine might have use for us as a satisfied, specialized cog. The problem, of course, is that being a cog suits nobody unless they are the recipients of the output of such cogs. Those at the top are not forced to specialize—they can range across subjects as they wish. Everyone else, however, must assume an obedient spot in the machine, and if they do not immediately have a specialization they better make it at least appear as though they do.
It is malarkey. As citizens of the universe, we all have the right to develop our own unique skill set to the fullest, and that skill set may require a lot of seemingly disparate non-related fields to overlap first. If our job is some tedious cog-like existence, we will not develop to fullness. We will be forever dissatisfied and simultaneously scared of disrupting our one little corner. Magick traditions will not let us do this. No wonder modern society has a stake in being sure such traditions remain on the outskirts. If they enter the mainstream, no one will be left to specialize, and those at the top will have to do their own work.
Nowhere does the fur fly faster than in the realm appertaining to Jesus. People are so full of “truth” where this claim exists, that there are upteen million denominations all clamoring for acceptance of their version of what they think he meant. Each one is quite insistent and earnest about what they believe was said. In a brief discussion I had with a Jehovah’s witness recently, for instance, I was informed that this person was a Jehovah’s witness because it was “what the Bible said”. Indeed, it is possible for me to write something with one intent in mind, and for someone else to interpret what I have written some other way entirely. There is a gap between what is said and what is meant.
This is why it is important to respect the backdrop against which a myth rests. For this reason, any Christian necessarily must understand Judaism if they wish to understand Jesus. After all, Judaism is the BACKDROP against which the story of Jesus rested, and it is only through consideration of Torah that we can even begin to appreciate why the story is there at all.
Where did Judaism come from? Likely an amalgamation of Babylonian, Sumerian, and Canaanite religions that abounded in the region. When one studies ancient spiritual traditions, one is keenly aware of tripping over the same stories in slightly varied forms from culture to culture. Because of the prevailing religious views of these traditions, there was a general “lookout” for a Messiah. There was a lot of confusion over who it was or might be, but the search was there because Jewish myth dictated that their must be.
At the time before Jesus, there was a tremendous reliance on strict adherence to law. Sacrifices had to be performed at certain times in certain ways. Schools of thought arose such that the FORM of religion was strictly observed. Jesus as a Jew most certainly observed the laws of Torah per Matthew 5:17-20:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Therefore whoever relaxes one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever does them and teaches them will be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”
So in other words, the “old laws” were not necessarily being “modified” nor “destroyed”. They were being fulfilled. This would seem to imply that in their current form, they were NOT being fulfilled—or at the very least there were serious problems with them. How were they not being fulfilled? Well, we see this curious line about the righteousness that exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees. In other words, the scribes and Pharisees were very conversant in the laws of God, but they were not so gifted in the actual uses of them in the manner that God intended them to be fulfilled. Knowledge of the form was abundant, application of them in a spiritual way was lacking.
So what that does that leave Jesus doing? Well, it leaves him as being the exemplar of love. Why was he being the exemplar of love? Because nobody else was, and so we might be able to surmise that the universe, or God, or what-have-you decided that human beings needed an example of spiritual love since they had the law but were applying it in such a manner as to forget the SPIRIT of the law. Where Torah is a lot like the planet of Saturn—structured, dry, strict adherence based–Jesus was more like Venus—love that checks the severity.
However, it was not that Jesus was serving as an exemplar to “everyone else” so much as specifically to the Jews—at least for the purposes of the Bible. Why was he serving as an exemplar to them? Because they had lost touch with the love side of spirituality. It was not that the Torah was null and void, but rather it was stagnant and dry. Hence, Jesus came along and shook up the “old order” of those who followed the rules strictly and stridently but perhaps did not appreciate the spirit in which those rules were written.
What then was Jesus’s sacrifice? Was it to save mankind? Sorta, kinda, not really. We can see from the backdrop of the mythos that the main audience is going to be the Jews. Period. Jesus was not so much a savior in the sense of “he would take their sins” so much as he was a savior because his entire life was lived as a love sacrifice for the Jewish population—to show them how their laws could be accomplished with love—and not simply with black-and-white legalism. In that he set that example and demonstrated how it could be done, then yes, he was a savior. He demonstrated how Torah could be applied and followed not because of the written word, but with the wisdom of the heart as mediator.
So where does this leave most of modern Christianity? Absolutely confused. Followers of Christ would, if they emulated the example of Jesus, NECESSARILY be fulfilling Torah law. However, simply ACCEPTING Jesus as a savior does nothing for a person because that was never the purpose of his existence. His example was meant to show HOW spiritual Judaism with Torah COULD BE DONE in the flesh in a way that honored spirit without also becoming rigidly legalistic. In other words, he was not a “stand-in-sacrifice” for the sins of mankind, but a “stand-in-sacrifice” because being an exemplar of Jewish Torah in a loving way demanded he be sacrificed.
For a little biblical support, Hebrews shows us this:
HEBREWS 10:16-17 NKJ
16 “This is the covenant that I will make with them after those days, says the LORD: I will put My laws into their hearts, and in their minds I will write them,”
In other words, Jesus was the heart side of the equation, and IF someone chose to be in union with Jesus, the LOVING APPLICATION of Torah, then they had another path to follow than simple rigid adherence to Torah.
The only way Jesus works as a mechanism for entry is to be in UNION with him which necessarily will mean observance of Torah as mediated by the heart. That does NOT mean that the old sacrifices and old ways are voided, simply that there are other pathways of wisdom to follow—that the strict adherence of law alone is not sufficient—it must be both in the mind and the heart.
Hence, any religion that holds mere acceptance of Jesus as savior is sufficient misunderstands their own roots. Anyone who is a Christian and does NOT uphold Torah be it through love or otherwise, is missing the point. The strange conundrum with Christianity is that it grabs ahold of mythology it but dimly understands that is quintessentially Jewish, and then attempts to wrestle the Jewishness out of it to distill down the Jesusy goodness that it wants to believe outside the context and reality of the Torah. If you take Jesus, you gotta take the Jewishness with it. There simply is no other way, unless one wishes to construct some other mythos which was never the case. If that’s so, why bother having a Bible based on Torah at all? Just cut that part out, pick the quotes you like by Jesus the best, and start your own religion. Or, alternatively, invent some entirely new Jesus altogether! Call him Pedro—redeemer of all sins! Vote for Pedro!